weakness

I thought I would sit and make a list of everything I feel to be a weakness of mine, to help me to better understand myself if nothing else.

First and foremost, I would probably label discipline as my biggest weakness. Not like discipline in all areas, just certain things I've noticed throughout the years. Most commonly, getting to bed at a reasonable time is very difficult for me. I don't know why exactly, I just have this unshakable desire to waste time whenever I begin to think about going to bed. Usually if I'm in the middle of doing something, playing or game or doing something else on my computer, I'll just keep pushing it and pushing it little by little until I end up going to bed 2 hours after I had intended. And if I get home from something late, instead of going straight to bed, I feel like I have to take time to unwind from whatever I was doing, even though just going to sleep really SHOULD be unwinding enough.

So then the problem of not going to bed early enough manifests itself the next day, and when I'm in school (like I am now) it can result in missed classes, which of course, has more compounded results. Even if I don't miss classes, if I don't get enough sleep I'll probably end up sleeping through them, in which case I might as well have stayed home in bed.

In addition to not being able to get myself to go to bed on time and the negative effects that can have on my classes and grades, I also have a very hard time reading out of textbooks. I'm not a huge reader to begin with, and when it's something as boring to me as a textbook, especially when I have something else on my mind that I'd rather be doing, it's almost impossible for me to concentrate and actually LEARN the stuff I'm reading instead of just letting it go in one eye and out the other, so to speak.

These two poor disciplinary habits are what I attribute to my failure at school when I went to BYU. They are still problems, but at least I recognize them now and I can adjust my life accordingly. It's kind of easy for me right now because I don't really have to study out of a textbook for any of my classes now, and my day starts with work 3 days a week, which will assuredly get me out of bed and started in my day even if I was up late the night before. I'm nervous about when I transfer to UNT in the fall, if the classes are harder, if the curriculum is different, I might find myself needing to study from a textbook a lot more. Also I may not be able to find a cush job like I have now to start my mornings with, so I'll be pressed to keep attendence at my classes. We'll see though, I know what the problem is so I hopefully can address it.

Other than certain disciplinary problems, sometimes I have ego trips. I try very hard to keep an open mind about things, to not shoot down other peoples' opinions and stuff, but sometimes people will use some fact or reference to support their argument, and somewhere in the back of my mind I might feel like I am more of an expert on that topic, so I'll insist that they are wrong, and argue it out. Sometimes I was right about them being wrong, sometimes I'm not, but usually the way I handle it always makes me come out looking like an ass.

Or another problem, when arguing a point sometimes I will use definitive statements to support MY argument, but in the heat of proving my point my definitive statements might not always be right, and usually it'll come out that it's wasn't right, and I'll desperately try to back pedal and try and to change the meaning of what I said so it looks like I wasn't wrong and don't lose ground in the argument. Just like the other thing, even if I CAN manage to play it off successfully that I meant something else and therefore wasn't wrong, I still come out looking like an ass.

I normally will admit my mistakes, if I have mispoken or mistreated someone, but just like the previous thing, I can lose myself in the heat of trying to prove a point or save face, and will shift the blame to something or someone else.

Sometimes I get a high-and-mighty complex too. I will feel like I've come upon some great achievement or enlightenment, and without thinking might pass judgment on people who don't derserve it, thinking they haven't done what I've done, or don't know what I know. I try not to, just sometimes I don't realize I'm doing it.

I'm trying to think of more weaknesses, because I know that's not all of them. I'll post more later if I can think of them, but I'll let this be a forum to add to as time goes on and/or as I develop new ones.